This was responsible for all my childhood “the wasp chased me” incidents, except for the one time I actually stepped on a nest
What? this is a thing?
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While taking photos of a Macroglossum moth species (꼬리박각시, a hummingbird hawk-moth) several years ago someone came up to me and said I should be more careful, as “dragonflies drink blood”.
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I… I just can’t. That was funny. That reminded me of when somebody, as far as my ears can remember, saw some coatis running by some garden trails in a park, and said ‘‘manatíes’’. I don’t think I need to translate that to English to tell what it means…
Anyway, in that same park but deeper in the woods there is a recreation of a well. It has a bottom full of organic matter and it has some water. A man with his couple passed by and looked at the well. ‘‘What’s in there?’’, he said. ‘‘Oh guppies’’, then he said as if he had expected something great and had been now deceived. Guess what. He was wrong. I challenge you all to guess what they were instead.
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I heard this from adults in my family when I was a kid. One of my parents went a bit further and said that I shouldn’t catch salamanders because they’ll jump down my throat. I think they didn’t want me catching critters and bringing them home. I don’t think they knew that if I somehow ingested a newt then it’d be a real issue. 
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Yeah! And I’ve always felt a bit iffy about the Harry Potter books promoting Cheese Newts as a desirable kids’ snack
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Mosquito larvae would be a good bet.
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No, something slightly more similar.
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This one isn’t dumb but it’s a pretty big misconception. Bats are diseased.
While it is true that bats can carry rabies, bats giving people rabies is exceptionally rare, 99% of human rabies cases come from dogs. Additionally even when they do have rabies most bats are rarely aggressive.
Also a correlation between bats and COVID, SARS, Ebola, or MERS outbreaks has never been proven (in fact transmission from bats to humans has never been recorded from any of these diseases) and is purely speculation. Bats are no more prone to disease than any other animal, and have been living alongside humans for hundreds of years. Even then, the only people at risk would be people who handle bats, which would rule out the vast majority of the global population.
Really bats get a bad rep, which is especially unwarranted when you put into account the amount of good things they do for us like eating tons of mosquitoes, as well as tons of agricultural pests (saving farmers millions), and they also do a lot of pollinating!
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Bats have been documented to have ebola https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3376795/ and hendra https://www.who.int/health-topics/hendra-virus-disease#tab=tab_1
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My mistake! There have been no recorded incidents of transmission from bats to humans in any of those diseases other than Hendra. I will edit my original post. Bats have still yet to be found to be a significant carrier of any major disease that poses a serious risk to people.
The Ebola outbreak is now thought to have not been spillover but rather endemic to Humans. (https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/4/e005783.info)
Hendra is transmitted from bats to horses and then from horses to people. But there have only been 4 human deaths from hendra. (https://www.who.int/health-topics/hendra-virus-disease#tab=tab_1)
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LGD? Low Grazing Dinosaur? Little Guide Dog? Lady Goat Dancing?
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Livestock Guard Dog, I think.
Large Golden Delicious, a monster fruiting tree once endemic to the northeastern United States ;)
(Let’s devise a new myth)
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I’m guessing leeches. It sounds like the right habitat.
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Possibly they were tadpoles? That’s what I find most often in that type of water.
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Gambusia?
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Yes, they were tadpoles.
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Touching a Toad will give you WARTS!!
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My grandfather believes the state has tagged and is tracking the location of every bear at all times. I have no idea how he got that idea in his head and he’s a retired engineer who worked for the government nearly his whole career.
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I just heard that the back end of a centipede with the two long legs is a venomous stinger. I just thought the front end was venomous.
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